Products that simplify our lives... and Project Jeremy Needs To Learn To Cook

Seventeen pounds. In five weeks. Seriously - seventeen freaking pounds in five weeks. Ladies, don't you hate him? I know, the male metabolism is a wonderful thing... if you're male. He didn't really need to lose weight, he's not trying to lose weight, it's simply a side-effect of his new healthier lifestyle, and it shows us that it's working. And I'm thrilled for him. He now weighs one pound more than me. Buttface.

Honestly though, I have to give Jeremy credit, it hasn't just fallen off - he said he was going to change his lifestyle, and he has. Completely. He pays close attention to his fat, cholesterol and sodium intake and makes sure he stays within his daily guidelines. Which really isn't easy, folks. He can't walk into a quick shop and grab something to eat when he's hungry, there's almost nothing in there he can eat unless they happen to have fresh fruit. And fast food is more or less out of the questions. So we (and by "we" I mostly mean "me" - but we'll get into that later) make most of what we eat from scratch these days. He either takes his lunch of chooses from a stockpile of heart healthy Lean Cuisines in the freezer at work. (By the way - not all Lean Cuisines are heart healthy, make sure you check the labels.) So let me tell you about some of the products/services we've found to help us out in this journey.

Ground Flax Seed Packets: In The Healthy Heart Cookbook: Over 700 Recipes for Every Day and Every Occasion, Dr. Piscatella recommends including two tablespoons a day of ground flax seed in your diet. As you may know, flax seed has become more and more popular in health circles in recent years. Pretty much every book, article or website I read about a heart healthy diet suggests you include ground flax seed in your daily diet. (Ground is better than whole because your body is more able to digest it - whole seeds can pass through your body undigested.) Flax seed is high in fiber, includes Omega-3 essential fatty acids and lignans (which has both plant estrogen and antioxidant qualities). It has been shown to reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. Research has shown that the Omega-3s help prevent hardening of the arteries and keep plaque from being deposited in the arteries. Kelley C. Fitzpatrick, M.Sc. (director of health and nutrition with the Flax Council of Canada - who may be a little biased...) says "Lignans in flax seed have been shown to reduce atherosclerotic plaque buildup by up to 75%." It reduces LDL ("bad" cholesterol). On a side note - it is also commonly used as a laxative, and... um... he doesn't actually need that assistance. Our niece and nephews don't call him Uncle Stinkybutt for nothing.

So at first, I went out and bought a bag of ground flax seed. You can sprinkle in on your oatmeal, in your yogurt, over your salad, etc. You can add it to recipes and use it in baking... and there's almost no taste at all. It claims to have a delicious nutty flavor - but Jeremy and I can't taste a thing. It just adds texture as far as I'm concerned. I told Jeremy he needed to add it to stuff and he kept forgetting - and I kept forgetting to add it to anything I was making.

Mom to rescue! She found these individual packets of ground flax seed at Schnuck's. Each packet contains 2 tablespoons - so Jeremy took a box to work and actually remembers to make sure he gets one into his body every day. I can't find them at Dierberg's, but they are at Schnuck's. Or you can order them in bulk online. I'm hoping to find them at Sam's or Costco the next time we're there.

Fruit My Cube: Several month ago I read about Fruit My Cube based in Belleville, IL and out of the Belleville Farmer's Market. It's a corporate program that delivers a box full of fruits and veggies to your workplace every week. They require a minimum number of subscribers to deliver to a company location. So I sent an inquiry to our HR department... and heard nothing. And forgot about it. But just a few weeks ago, Express Scripts started hosting a Farmer's Market every month in our cafeteria... and they're doing it in cooperation with the Belleville Farmer's Market... and Fruit My Cube is a part of the whole program! We just received our second cube on Monday. I get it and hand it right over to Jeremy to keep at work. It's a great service and it supports a wonderful program, Taste Buds. Taste Buds is a program from the Belleville Farmer's Market that introduces healthy eating habits to children in schools in an effort to fight childhood obesity. Hey - Oprah likes 'em!

Fruit2day: Fruit2day is available in the produce section of most grocery stores. Each little bottle contains two servings of fruit. There's no added sugar or preservatives. It's basically pureed fruit - it includes bits of fruit, so you get the fiber you'd get from whole fruit - unlike fruit juices. Everyone needs four servings of fruit per day - so just one of these little bottles gets you halfway there. And they don't sit on the counter and go bad because you forgot about them, or because they looked so pretty in the store but aren't really ripe enough and then you forgot about them and then they went bad while you were gone for the weekend and now you have little gnats flying around the rotten fruit on your counter and it stinks...

Low Sodium V8: We've all heard of V8, but Jeremy's never had one. Instead of bopping him on the head and saying "You coulda had a V8"... which wouldn't have gone over real well... I told him it tastes like a bloody mary sans vodka. That was all he needed to hear - he was sold.

So he gets plenty of whole fruits and vegetables, but Fruit2day and Low Sodium V8 vegetable juice are great snacks and helps him to make sure he gets all his fruits and veggies in every day. Rather than reaching for a bag of chips or a sleeve of Oreo cookies or a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter, etc.

So now let's talk about cooking. I love to cook and I honestly enjoy it... however, free time is just not something I have an abundance of. I work 50-60 hours/week and am in grad school full time (or will be again as of October 2 - I had to drop last semester due to Jeremy's surgery). Which means the workload involved in doing so much cooking is too much for me to handle. So that brings me to "Project Jeremy Needs to Learn to Cook".

Just because I enjoy doing something and am pretty good at it, doesn't mean I can TEACH anyone else to do it. This issue has come up now and again in the last eleven years, but Jeremy was just unwilling to move beyond chili, burgers & brats on the grill and omelets. He figured that I like to cook, he doesn't know how, why should he bother to learn. If I don't want to cook or get angry that I do all the grocery shopping and cooking... he'll just drive through Taco Bell! Well, that doesn't cut it anymore.

I did finally force him to start cooking his own game a couple of years ago when he complained that I wasn't using it up. So I told him - you killed it, you cook it. So he's managed a few crockpot roasts and a duck breast or two.

In the past when I've tried to teach him to make something it's been... unpleasant. He goes into it feeling resentful that I'm pushing him to do this and I go into it irritated that he doesn't want to do it. He gets mad that I use terms he isn't familiar with (like sauté), I get mad that he doesn't remember something I said thirty seconds ago. You can see where this is going. It usually ends in a huge fight, results in a nice expensive piece of cookware having been ruined and the smoke alarm screaming.

This time it's a little different. Jeremy agrees that he has take responsibility for what goes into his body - it can't all be on me. So he's willing to learn to cook. He wants me to teach him. I, however, want to stay married.

I had hoped he'd be willing to take a basic cooking class at The Kitchen Conservatory called Basics of Cooking. It's 3 hours a day, once a week for four weeks. It's a hands-on course that focuses on simple techniques - how to roast, pan-sear, stir-fry, make soups and simple sauces, bake from scratch - and you cook the food and eat it there! That way, someone who does this for a living would be teaching him in a setting that is geared toward beginning cooks, surrounded by other beginning cooks (mostly other men). I've taken other classes there and it's wonderful. But he nixed that idea. We did have one cooking lesson last week and it went relatively well (neither of us needed to call a lawyer) - but I still don't think it's a good idea. Especially after October 2 when I won't even have time to cook if I wanted to!

So I'm open to suggestions. Anybody have any ideas? Would anyone like to volunteer to teach? Has anybody else learned to cook as an adult or taught any adult to cook?

(P.S. The moral of the story here, for those of you with young sons, please teach them basic cooking skills for them to build upon as they grow up. And teach them proper nutrition. What cholesterol is and where it comes from, the different types of fat, etc. It's SO much easier to learn when you're young than it is when you're in your mid-thirties!)